Vakuumi

My XMonad packages got a page

2009-12-10T01:22:00Z

As I'm the maintainer of SlackBuilds for XMonad and a few related packages at SlackBuilds.org, I thought I'd make the binary packages easier to find, too.

Melinks version 0.0.9

2009-06-29T19:53:00Z

melinks version 0.0.9 adds Zotero, and adds support for Facebook user names.

Melinks version 0.0.8

2009-06-06T22:11:00Z

melinks version 0.0.8 adds LiveJournal, Moozement and StackOverflow to the list of sites, adds title attribute to the images when in icon mode, and points to Plaxo crawler as another example of Social Graph consumer.

Melinks version 0.0.7

2009-05-23T01:09:00Z

melinks version 0.0.7 fixes a LinkedIn profile URL, and adds Plaxo, brightkite, readernaut, OpenStreetMap and Advogato support.

Melinks version 0.0.6

2009-05-21T01:00:00Z

melinks version 0.0.6 fixes a HTML bug and makes the XFN links interoperable with plaxo crawler.

Melinks version 0.0.5

2009-05-20T18:55:00Z

melinks version 0.0.5 adds libre.fm and OpenDesktop.org to the list of supported services.

Melinks version 0.0.4

2009-05-14T23:55:00Z

melinks version 0.0.4 adds easier favicon caching (no need to repeat the cached URL in config.py) and github to the list of supported services.

Melinks version 0.0.3

2009-05-13T23:26:00Z

melinks version 0.0.3 just adds Jaiku to the list of supported services.

Melinks version 0.0.2

2009-05-13T00:44:00Z

The "Elsewhere" section on the left (or bottom, if styles are disabled), is generated with my melinks Pyblosxom plugin. Now if only Google would reindex this page so that the example in the plugin manual would work, I could get on announcing the release on relevant places... :)

The result of eating right for nine months: -10kg.

2009-02-27T07:26:00Z

I started this low carb (in finnish) "diet" at the beginning of June 2008, so today it's been nine months. The results are good: I've lost ten kilograms and I'm feeling much better generally. The reason I put the word diet in quotes is that this way of eating is here to stay. Calling it a diet is just a similar habbit like calling everything a project, even if the thing has no budget nor an end in sight.

Django, OpenID and OAuth

2009-01-19T02:15:00Z

I have previously written how I decided to implement Recycloid server using Django and django-openid. Now I've done some more experimenting and OAuth part will be implemented using django-oauth.

If you've already got (or are willing to get) an OpenID, you can login to a linuxbox.fi test server. You can also browse the source code of the server and its history using your browser (thanks to LoggerHead). The Bazaar branch can be found at http://linuxbox.fi/~vmj/src/mysite if you want to try it yourself.

If you do login, and register a new OAuth Consumer, you can use the test_client.sh shell script (revision 25) to test the OAuth access. The script is tested using ash on a Linux environment, and requires at least wget and optionally lynx installed. Before you run the script, export CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET environment variables (with matching values you get at the site).

Django and OpenID

2008-11-30T21:16:00Z

I've been meaning to start developing the server part for Recycloid. It's otherwise quite boring server, but it should allow users to login using OpenID. I finally decided to look into implementing it using Django.

For OpenID, I found three options: django-authopenid, django-openid and django-openid-auth. In the following I will take a look into first two of them, focusing on their suitability to my needs. The third one seems abandoned (only developed between Sep 27 - Oct 18 2007), so I will not look into it further.

django-authopenid (version 0.9.6)

django-authopenid is easy to set up by following the README. Its main feature is that it allows users to login either with "legacy" username/password pair or an OpenID. When user authenticates via OpenID for the first time, user needs to associate the OpenID either with an existing account or a new account. That basically means that the user needs to either login with site specific username and a password or create a new account picking a unique username and a new password. That's pretty much the chore I was hoping OpenID would make obsolete.

django-authopenid has seen a pretty steady development since its birth on Nov 2007. I gather that this project is based on an older version of django-openid code. Support for multiple OpenIDs per account is under development, while it is part of django-openid feature set already.

django-openid (SVN checkout, revision 57)

I had to work a little to get this one installed and working. It seems like it's developed using Python 2.5 (or newer), but I'm doing this experiment on a Debian 4.0 which comes with Python 2.4.4. First thing I needed to do is install a backport of hashlib, which is bundled in Python 2.5. That was easy. But the combination of Python 2.4 and hashlib 20081119 triggered a bug in python-openid library, which seems to get fixed with a little patch.

Once installed, this package seems to fit my requirements quite nicely. User logs in and that's it. No need for registering with the site.

As can be seen from the version, this project hasn't actually released anything, yet. The development of this software began on Feb 2007, and has seen intermittent activity since. The activity has still been more active than most one man shows.

Got my Openmoko Freerunner

2008-09-01T10:00:00Z

I finally got my Freerunner and the debug board. It sure feels different than any Nokia that I've held.

gShuffle 0.1

2007-12-20T17:35:00Z

My significant other bought an iPod shuffle for herself. She sometimes does that. I mean, buy things without checking whether it works undel Linux or not. Thus far I've managed to make them work, and this was no exeption. It was actually ridiculously easy: it shows up as a USB disk and at least GnomeVFS sees it as an iPod kind of thing. Rhythmbox can read its content, gtkpod probably works with it, and then there's gnupod and ipodshuffle.

I was not happy. I agree with the author of ipodshuffle: iPod shuffle is way too simple device to be used with gtkpod. I looked at the user interface of gtkpod for about 10 seconds to come to that conclusion. So I searched for an alternative and found ipodshuffle. Like gnupod, ipodshuffle is a command line tool to manage the files on an iPod. Basically, ipodshuffle is built on top of gnupod and adds the capability to save the files from a playlist to an iPod.

Still not satisfied. There's no way my girlfriend will memorize a single command just so she can use an iPod. And think about it, how uncool it is if the first thing you must do to manage your iPod is to fire up your favourite terminal. It must be the mother of all Linux jokes. "Your favourite terminal".

So gShuffle was born. At its 0.1 release, it's crude. It has two features: adding tracks and removing tracks. I wanted the user interface to be as simple as the device itself, while still informative. With this release I'm not quite there, but it allows my girlfriend to use her iPod. (In commercial world this would be 1.0, but fortunately we're not that hasty with Free Software.)

Installation

Download, untar, gunzip and copy the three files gshuffle.py, gshuffle.glade and executor.py to a suitable directory of your choise (e.g. to /usr/local/bin). Hey I told you it's crude, it has no installation script at the moment.

You will need pyGtk and gnupod installed. I'm not sure about the versions.

Usage

Run 'python gshuffle.py'. Alternatively, with Gnome it's easiest to go to "System" / "Preferences" / "Removable Drives and Media" and on the "Multimedia" tab type the above command to the "Portable Music Players" section.

Note that this version does not unmount the drive for you. You will need to do that yourself. It takes time to unmount the iPod if you have changed the content a lot.

This is my first post

2007-11-18T00:43:00Z

This is my first post with PyBlosxom.